Second Temple Judaism
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Second Temple Judaism is the
The Second Temple period was marked by the emergence of multiple religious currents as well as extensive cultural, religious, and political developments among
According to Jewish tradition, authentic prophecy (נְבוּאָה, Nevu’ah) ceased during the early years of the Second Temple period; this left Jews without their version of divine guidance at a time when they felt most in need of support and direction.[3] Under Hellenistic rule, the growing Hellenization of Judaism became a source of resentment among Jewish traditionalists, who clung to strict monotheistic beliefs. Opposition to Hellenistic influence on Jewish religious and cultural practices was a major catalyst for the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire. Following the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty, traditional Judaism was reasserted by the Maccabees across the Land of Israel as they expanded their independent territory. The later years of the Second Temple period saw the development of a number of Jewish messianic ideas. From c. 170 BC to 30 AD, five successive generations of the Zugot headed the Jews' spiritual affairs; it was during this period that several factions, such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and early Christians were formed. The "people of the land", that is the uneducated people of the Holy Land, may be seen as another faction of Second Temple Judaism.
Historical background
Periods
(Note: dates and periods are in many cases approximate and/or conventional)
- Persian, 539–333 BC
- Hellenistic, 333–164 BC
- Herodian Kingdom of Judea, 37 BC – 4 BC
- Herodian Tetrarchy, 4 BC – 6 AD
- Roman, 6 AD – 70 AD
Overview
In 586 BC,
The Persian period ended after
Jewish diasporas
The Jewish exiles in Babylon were not slaves or prisoners, nor were they badly treated, and when the Persians gave permission for them to return to Jerusalem the majority elected to remain where they were.
The Samaritans
Overall, Second Temple Judaism and Samaritanism were two religions that gradually split from the common religion of Yahwism.[23][24] For most of the Second Temple period, Samaria was larger, richer, and more populous than Judea—down to about 164 BC there were probably more Samaritans than Judeans living in Palestine.[25] They had their own temple on Mount Gerizim near Shechem and regarded themselves as the true Israel, who remained after Eli, a wicked high priest, convinced the other Israelites to abandon Gerizim and worship at Shiloh.[26] Second Temple Judeans, however, derided them as foreign converts and the impure offspring of mixed marriages.[27] By the late 2nd century BC, the Jews and Samaritans permanently split after a Hasmonean king destroyed a Samaritan temple at Mount Gerizim; before that the Samaritans seem to have regarded themselves as part of the wider Jewish community, but afterwards they denounced the Jerusalem temple as anathema to Yahweh.[28][29]
Role in the compilation of the Hebrew Bible
In recent decades it has become increasingly common among scholars to assume that much of the
Prophetic works were also of particular interest to the Persian-era authors, with some works being composed at this time (the last ten chapters of
In the Hellenistic period, the scriptures were translated into Greek by the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora, who also produced a rich literature of their own covering epic poetry, philosophy, tragedy and other forms. Less is known of the Babylonian diaspora, but the Seleucid period produced works such as the court tales of the Book of Daniel (chapters 1-6 of Daniel - chapters 7-12 were a later addition), and the books of Tobit and Esther.[31] The eastern Jews were also responsible for the adoption and transmission of the Babylonian and Persian apocalyptic tradition seen in Daniel.[32]
The documentary hypothesis is disputed by some Christians.[33]
Features
"True Israel"
The Hebrew Bible represents the beliefs of a small sector within the Israelite community, who were exiled by the Babylonians and emphasized on orthodox worship, genealogical purity and adherence to the codified law.[34][35] In the earliest stages of the Persian period, the returnees insisted on a strict separation between themselves ("Israel") and those who had never gone into exile ("Canaanites"), to the extent of prohibiting intermarriage; this was presented in terms of religious purity, but there may have been a practical concern for land ownership.[36][37][38] Ethnic markers for Israelite (or later, Jewish) identity were radically reformed, with increased emphasis on genealogical descent and/or faith in Yahweh, compared to circumcision.[39][40]
Views on gentile integration varied across Jewish schools of thought. The
Whilst most contemporary Jews had no problem with integrating gentiles, a minority adopted views from
Emphasis on temples
Second Temple Judaism was centered not on synagogues, which began to appear only in the 3rd century BC, but on the Temple itself, and a cycle of continual animal
The priesthood and the autonomy of Yehud
The priesthood underwent profound changes with the Second Temple.[53] Under the First Temple, the priesthood had been subordinate to the kings, but in the Second Temple, with the monarchy and even the state in the hands of foreign rulers, they became independent.[54] The priesthood under the High Priest, which was unheard of in earlier times, became the governing authority, making the province of Yehud a de-facto theocracy, although it seems unlikely that they had significant autonomy.[53] In the Hellenistic period, the High Priest continued to play a vital role with both cultic and civic obligations, and the office reached its height under the Hasmoneans, who made themselves priest-kings.[55] Both Herod and the Romans severely reduced the importance of the High Priest, appointing and deposing High Priests to suit their purposes.[56]
Integration of Idumean customs
Since the Hasmonean era, the Idumeans were heavily integrated in Judean society. Idumean-majority populations existed in the southern and western Judea and they intermingled with Judeans.
Intellectual currents
Monotheism
There was a sharp break between ancient Israelite religion and the Judaism of the Second Temple.
Messianism and the end times
The Persian period saw the development of expectation in a future human king who would rule a purified Israel as God's representative at the end of time – that is, a messiah. The first to mention this were Haggai and Zechariah, both prophets of the early Persian period. They saw Zerubbabel as a figure similar to a Messiah, as a descendant of the House of David who seemed, briefly, to be about to re-establish the ancient royal line, or in Zerubbabel and the first High Priest, Joshua (Zechariah writes of two messiahs, one royal and the other priestly). These early hopes were dashed (Zerubabbel disappeared from the historical record, although the High Priests continued to be descended from Joshua), and thereafter there are merely general references to a Messiah of (meaning descended from) David.[68][54]
Wisdom and the Word
Wisdom, or hokmah, implied the learning acquired by study and formal education: "those who can read and write, those who have engaged in study, and who know literature, are the wise par excellence" (Grabbe, 2010, p. 48).
Conflict between Judaism and the Judean state
During the Hasmoean dynasty, Jews were conflicted on whether to be religiously or politically oriented, which was represented by the thematic differences in
Widespread adoption of Torah law
In his seminal Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, Julius Wellhausen argued that Judaism as a religion based on widespread observance Torah law first emerged in the year 444 BC when, according to the biblical account provided in the Book of Nehemiah (chapter 8), a priestly scribe named Ezra read a copy of the Mosaic Torah before the populace of Judea assembled in a central Jerusalem square.[71] Wellhausen believed that this narrative should be accepted as historical because it sounds plausible, noting "The credibility of the narrative appears on the face of it."[72] Following Wellhausen, most scholars throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries have accepted that widespread Torah observance began sometime around the middle of the 5th century BC.
More recently, Yonatan Adler has argued that in fact there is no surviving evidence to support the notion that the Torah was widely known, regarded as authoritative, and put into practice, any time prior to the middle of the 2nd century BC.[73] Adler explored the likelihhood that Judaism, as the widespread practice of Torah law by Jewish society at large, first emerged in Judea during the reign of the Hasmonean dynasty, centuries after the putative time of Ezra.[74] Nonetheless, this view conflicts with the scholarly consensus.[75]
Proselytism
The issue of conversion to Judaism and Jewish proselytism in Second Temple Judaism has occupied many scholars from the 19th century to the present day. Research has not yet yielded a consensus among scholars: some believe that Judaism was a missionary religion, and others reject their conclusions. Some assess that the conversion of Gentiles to Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman periods was a wide-ranging phenomenon of great demographic importance, while others doubt this. Modern research does not have the possibility to determine how many Gentiles converted, and it is not possible to determine what their share was in the total Jewish population.[citation needed]
Some scholars suggested that the saying attributed to Jesus on the Gospel of Matthew, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are",[76] is an evidence of Jewish proselytism during the time period. However, scholars such as Martin Goodman, for instance, argue that phrase relates to the Pharisees' attempt to persuade Jews to join their school of thought rather than their efforts to convert non-Jews.[77]
The emergence of Christianity
The
Recent work by historians paints a more complex portrait of late Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. Some historians have suggested that, before his death, Jesus created amongst his believers such certainty that the Kingdom of God and the resurrection of the dead was at hand, that with few exceptions[86] when they saw him shortly after his execution, they had no doubt that he had been resurrected, and that the arrival of the Kingdom and resurrection of the dead was at hand. These specific beliefs were compatible with Second Temple Judaism.[87] In the following years the restoration of the Kingdom, as Jews expected it, failed to occur. Some Christians began to believe instead that Christ, rather than simply being the Jewish messiah, was God made flesh, who died for the sins of humanity, marking the beginning of Christology.[88]
Scholars additionally note the role of Hellenistic Judaism in Christianity and believe that the doctrine of Jesus's death for the redemption of mankind was not possible without Hellenism.[89][a]
While on one hand Jesus and the very first Christians had all been ethnically Jewish, the Jews by and large continued to reject Jesus as the Messiah. This affected early Christianity's relationship with Judaism and the surrounding pagan traditions. The anti-Christian polemicist Celsus criticised Jews for deserting their Jewish heritage while they had claimed to hold on to it. To the Emperor Julian, Christianity was simply an apostasy from Judaism. These factors hardened Christian attitudes towards Jewry.[90]
See also
- Hillel and Shammai
- Intertestamental period
- Jewish Christians
- Mandaeans, may have been part of the Essene community
- Messiah ben Joseph
- Split of early Christianity and Judaism
- Third Temple
- Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period
Notes
- ^ Eddy & Boyd (2007), p. 136: "Burton Mack argues that Paul’s view of Jesus as a divine figure who gives his life for the salvation of others had to originate in a Hellenistic rather than a Jewish environment. Mack writes, "Such a notion [of vicarious human suffering] cannot be traced to old Jewish and/ or Israelite traditions, for the very notion of a vicarious human sacrifice was anathema in these cultures. But it can be traced to a Strong Greek tradition of extolling a noble death." More specifically, Mack argues that a Greek "myth of martyrdom" and the "noble death" tradition are ultimately responsible for influencing the hellenized Jews of the Christ cults to develop a divinized Jesus."
Eddy & Boyd (2007), p. 93further note that "The most sophisticated and influential version of the hellenization thesis was forged within the German Religionsgeschichtliche Schule of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—now often referred to as the "old history of religions school." Here, the crowning literary achievement in several ways is Wilhelm Bousset’s 1913 work Kyrios Christos. Bousset envisions two forms of pre-Pauline Christianity: 1. In the early Palestinian community, and 2. In the Hellenistic communities."
References
- ISBN 978-1-317-34958-7.
- ISBN 978-0-253-34286-7.
- ^ The Jewish Backgrounds of the New Testament: Second Commonwealth Judaism in Recent Study, Wheaton College, Previously published in Archaeology of the Biblical World, 1/2 (1991), pp. 40–49. [dead link]
- ^ Grabbe 2010, p. 2.
- ^ a b Coogan, Brettler & Newsom 2007, p. xxii.
- ^ Grabbe 2010, pp. 2–3.
- ^ Davies & Rogerson 2005, p. 89.
- ^ Grabbe 2010, pp. 5–17.
- ^ Nelson 2014, pp. 256–257.
- ^ Malamat & Ben-Sasson 1976, pp. 245–246.
- ^ Malamat & Ben-Sasson 1976, pp. 299–303.
- ^ Albertz 2003, p. 101.
- ^ a b Berquist 2007, pp. 3–4.
- ^ Coogan, Brettler & Newsom 2007, p. xxv.
- ^ Hegermann 1990, p. 146.
- ^ Collins 2000, p. 5.
- ^ Hegermann 1990, p. 131.
- ^ Strayer, Joseph R. ed. (1986). "Jerusalem" Dictionary of the Middle Ages. 7 New York:Charles Scribner's Sons. p.59.
- victory of Christianity in the fourth century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions – pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.
- Louis H. Feldman, "The Omnipresence of the God-Fearers" Archived 2020-10-24 at the Wayback Machine, Biblical Archaeology Review12, 5 (1986), Center for Online Judaic Studies.
- ISBN 978-0-664-25017-1.
- ISBN 978-15-55406-96-7. "As pious gentiles, the God-fearers stood somewhere between Greco-Roman piety and Jewish piety in the synagogue. In his classic but now somewhat outdated study titled Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, Harvard scholar George Foot Moore argued that the existence of the God-fearers provides evidence for the synagogue's own missionary work outside of Palestine during the first century C.E. The God-fearers were the result of this Jewish missionary movement."
- ^ Cohen 2014, p. 169.
- ^ Pummer 2016, p. 25.
- ^ Knoppers 2013, p. 2.
- ^ Cohen 2014, p. 168.
- ^ Knoppers 2013, p. 3.
- ^ Cohen 2014, pp. 168–169.
- ^ see also: Jonathan Bourgel, "The Destruction of the Samaritan Temple by John Hyrcanus: A Reconsideration", JBL 135/3 (2016), pp. 505–523
- ^ a b c Coogan, Brettler & Newsom 2007, p. xxiii.
- ^ Coogan, Brettler & Newsom 2007, p. xxvi.
- ^ Coogan, Brettler & Newsom 2007, p. xxvxxvi.
- ISBN 978-1-64585-151-6.
- ^ Wright 1999, p. 52.
- ^ Nelson 2014, p. 185.
- ^ Moore & Kelle 2011, pp. 443–447.
- JSTOR 42614919– via JSTOR.
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- JSTOR 42614919– via JSTOR.
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- ^ ISBN 978-90-47-41061-4.
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- ^ Josephus, The Jewish War iv. 4, § 5
- ^ "Josephus, Antiquities Book XVIII". earlyjewishwritings.com.
- ISBN 978-0190461850.
- ^ Flusser 2009, p. 8.
- ^ ISBN 9780199834273.
- ^ ISBN 9780199914456.
- ^ McGuire, J. Amanda (2011). "Sacred Times: The Book of Jubilees at Qumran". Papers. 2 – via Digital Commons @ Andrews University.
- ^ Schiffman, Lawrence H., Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: their True Meaning for Judaism and Christianity, Anchor Bible Reference Library (Doubleday) 1995.
- ISBN 978-1108473767.
- ^ Grabbe 2010, pp. 40–42.
- ^ a b Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 448.
- ^ a b Albertz 2003, p. 130.
- ^ Grabbe 2010, p. 47.
- ^ Grabbe 2010, pp. 47–48.
- JSTOR 26477573.
- ^ Strabo, Geography Bk.16.2.34
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- ^ Katz, Hayah (2014). "Biblical Purification: Was It Immersion?". TheTorah.com. Archived from the original on March 23, 2024.
- ^ Moore & Kelle 2011, p. 449.
- ^ a b Albertz 1994a, p. 61.
- ^ Ackerman 2003, p. 395.
- ^ Smith 2002, p. 47.
- ^ Betz 2000, p. 917.
- ^ Wanke 1984, pp. 182–183.
- ^ a b Grabbe 2010, p. 48.
- ^ Schwartz, Daniel R. (2021). "Judea versus Judaism: Between 1 and 2 Maccabees". TheTorah.com. Archived from the original on March 16, 2024.
- ^ Wellhausen 1885, pp. 405–410.
- ^ Wellhausen 1885, p. 408 n. 1.
- ^ Adler 2022.
- ^ Adler 2022, pp. 223–234.
- ISBN 978-0-664-25784-2.
- ^ Matthew 23:15
- ^ M. Goodman, Mission and Conversion. Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire, Oxford 1994, pp. 69-74
- ^ Cohen 2014, pp. 165–166.
- ISBN 9781595584687. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
- ISBN 9780520215924. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
- ISBN 9004144846. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
- ISBN 9781400842285. Retrieved 20 January 2014.
- ^ Alan F. Segal, Rebecca's Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
- Jewish Christians seemed to regard Christianity as an affirmation of every aspect of contemporary Judaism, with the addition of one extra belief — that Jesus was the Messiah. Unless males were circumcised, they could not be saved(Acts 15:1)."
- ^ Jewish Encyclopedia: Baptism: "According to rabbinical teachings, which dominated even during the existence of the Temple (Pes. viii. 8), Baptism, next to circumcision and sacrifice, was an absolutely necessary condition to be fulfilled by a proselyte to Judaism (Yeb. 46b, 47b; Ker. 9a; 'Ab. Zarah 57a; Shab. 135a; Yer. Kid. iii. 14, 64d). Circumcision, however, was much more important, and, like baptism, was called a "seal" (Schlatter, "Die Kirche Jerusalems," 1898, p. 70). But as circumcision was discarded by Christianity, and the sacrifices had ceased, Baptism remained the sole condition for initiation into religious life. The next ceremony, adopted shortly after the others, was the imposition of hands, which, it is known, was the usage of the Jews at the ordination of a rabbi. Anointing with oil, which at first also accompanied the act of Baptism, and was analogous to the anointment of priests among the Jews, was not a necessary condition."
- ^ "John 20:24–29". bible.oremus.org. Retrieved 2023-05-20.
- ^ Fredriksen 2000, pp. 133–134.
- ^ Fredriksen 2000, pp. 136–142.
- ^ Mack 1995.
- ISBN 978-1-139-48730-6.
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